Politics Has Always Been Risky Business

The recent Scooter Libby case moves columnist John Podhoretz to mourn that anyone taking a top government job ought to have his head examined. 

If you were interviewing a candidate for such a job, he writes, you would have to tell the candidate that the chance of

having to hire a lawyer at some point during your employment with us around 40 percent.

Who would be so crazy to do that, when the lawyer fees alone might be enough to ruin you?

It’s certainly true that politics has gotten rougher in the last twenty years.  Maybe.  But then politics has been contested more in the last twenty years.  Conservatives and Republicans have been less and less inclined to go with the flow of more and more government programs and more and more inclined to contest the issue with their liberal and Democratic friends.

And now of course they can turn to usgovernmentspending.com and get the figures.  Just how much is enough for government health care or government education?  $700 billion? $800 billion?  A trillion or two?  When would liberals cry Uncle?

Liberals and Democrats have noticed this.  They wonder what ever happened to the gentlemanly Republicans they used to know.  They remember the Ev Dirksen and Jerry Ford show on TV.  Now there was a pair of decent Republicans! Now they are all so coarse and rude—and, you know, religious.

But the fact is that politics has always been a rough game.  In our day the worst that can happen to you is disgrace and imprisonment.  But in the good old days it was treason, attainder, execution, and banishment, spiced by the occasional episode of torture.  And all because you joined with the wrong people or excited the suspicion of a powerful peer of the realm.

So it’s true what J-pod says:

Every single person who has worked in the highest reaches of the U.S. government in recent memory has worked intimately with someone who has gone to jail, been convicted of a crime or been impoverished by legal fees - someone they know to be a fine person, a dedicated person with a family, who is the farthest thing from a criminal and yet whose name is dragged through the mud and whose reputation is trashed.

 But it was ever thus.  That’s why they call fame a bitch goddess.